WildBear ad: 14 winters guiding. The man who saved my weekend was a customer.

There is a quiet panic that sets in for an ice guide that the people on dry land never understand. It is not the cold. And it is not the cracking ice. It’s watching your sled drop to 1 cylinder and calculating how many weekends of earnings you’re going to lose in a season that only lasts a dozen or so weekends but makes your whole year. Because a sled with 1 cylinder means no hauling. No hauling means no fish house, no augers, no heaters, no electronics, and 4 guys who drove 6 hours from Iowa standing in a parking lot at 5 in the morning. The 850 can still run. It just can’t pull a load on one lung. I learned all of that the hard way, and I learned the fix from one of my own customers at a quarter to 5 in the morning. He made me promise to tell other guides. So that’s what this is. I’m not a mechanic, and I’m not selling anything. No one paid me. I'm Russ. I've guided ice fishing on Upper Red Lake out of Waskish, Minnesota, for 14 winters. Small operation. One sled, one Otter sled behind it, an Eskimo flip-over, a couple of augers and up to 4 guests a day. My wife Karen books the trips from the kitchen table. I do everything else. The sled is a 2024 Ski-Doo Expedition SE with the 850 E-TEC. 165 horsepower, a 154-inch track, a hitch on the back and a passenger seat I can pull when I need the room for gear. It's a workhorse that can tow, and it has to be. It hauls clients and all the gear from the lot to the ice every morning, and it pulls my rig out of the slush when the lake gets ugly. I've done every belt, every carbide and every bearing on it myself. In this business, the cold breaks things. You learn to fix them before daylight. The day after Christmas I was out setting up for the weekend, hauling gear back to the access, when the 850 started missing and then dropped to one cylinder. Fouled plug. I knew the sound. I limped it back to the trailer on one lung. I wasn't worried. Plugs are a 20-minute job. I've changed 100 of them on every sled I’ve ever owned. Then I got the side panel and the belt guard off in the shop and found out where Ski-Doo put them. Here’s what I didn’t know, and what you probably don’t know either, sitting there just as sure as I was. Somewhere along the way, they stopped building sleds for the man who rides them. They build them now to go together fast on a line and to come apart only at a dealer. And the way they do that is they bury the parts you’ll be changing most, the spark plugs, in the worst possible place. On the 850 the plugs don’t sit out where a man can get at them. They sit up top, under the airbox, behind the steering rods, down past the clutch. You can put a flashlight on them. You can get a socket on them. But the airbox sits over them like a lid, the steering rods are right in front, the clutch is right beside, and there is not one inch of room to swing a ratchet in there. The plugs are not the problem. The problem is the geometry of every tool that will physically fit in that gap. I had a good kit. Of course I did, because that sled is what pays all the bills. But they all failed the same way. My three-eighths ratchet went in first. It seated fine. Then the steering rod stopped the handle dead before the pawl could catch. Click. Reset. Click. The plug didn't even know I was there. A swivel. It found the plug and folded over sideways the second I leaned on it. A stubby. Maybe 3 degrees of swing before the handle hit the clutch, and then it slipped off. I'd read every forum thread on 850 plugs. Pull the secondary. Pull the jackshaft. I've never had the clutch off that sled, and I wasn't about to learn at 10 o'clock at night with 4 guys driving up from Iowa. The dealer was backed up past New Year's. Made sense. Everybody's sled breaks the same week. But I couldn’t stop thinking I was being punished for something. Here's what that weekend meant. 4 guests, 2 days, a little over $1,600. That's real money in a season that only runs as long as the ice does. And it being Christmas weekend, I was about to lose my biggest payday of the year. At 1 in the morning Karen came out to the shop in her coat and asked if she should start calling them. I told her to give me till 5. The Iowa guys always show up early. At a quarter to 5 Gene Wolters' truck pulled in next to the shop. Gene's 71. He spent 33 years keeping trucks and plows running for the county highway shop in Mason City, and he's fished with me every Christmas weekend for 9 of those years. He walked in, saw the panels on the floor, saw my knuckles and saw my face. “What’ve we got, Russ?” So I told him. The plug, the steering rod, the swivel, the stubby, the dealer. All of it. Gene listened the way old hands listen, nodding like he’d heard the story a hundred times. Then he leaned in over the sled with his flashlight for a long minute. “You ever use a chain bar?” he said. “I don’t know if it’ll work on this, but it’s worth a shot.” I told him I didn’t know what that was. He went back out to his truck and came in with a flat blue bar about the length of his forearm. He told me to press my thumb on one end. Something turned inside it. Not a hinge. Not a wobble. A chain, sealed inside the bar. "The chain carries the turn around the corner," Gene said. "Socket goes down on the plug where your hand won't fit. Ratchet stays out by the clutch where you've got room to swing it. You can do the work, Russ. I’ve seen you do it. You just can't reach it." He slid it in past the steering rods, set the socket on the plug, put a ratchet on the far end, and handed it to me. "Your sled. You turn it." It broke loose on the first pull. The second one too. New plugs in, brought down by hand, panels on, and the 850 fired on both cylinders like nothing ever happened. We were drilling holes by first light. Drill, check, move. Gene's son-in-law caught the biggest walleye of the weekend before 8. That night in the fish house I asked Gene where he got the bar. He said it’s the only tool he makes every man in his family carry. And he gets it direct from the maker’s site. $79. He was very firm about that. Told me to never buy one off Amazon. He said a buddy at the highway shop bought one off there that looked just the same, but it had a universal joint inside instead of a chain, and it folded the first time he leaned on it, same as my swivel did. I ordered one before we pulled the lines. Before they left Sunday, the Iowa guys booked next year. Same weekend. 10 years. I've spent 14 winters taking care of people out on that ice. Making sure they're warm, making sure the ice is good, making sure they go home with fish. I never once thought about what it would look like the other way around. When I tried to thank him, Gene just shrugged. "You've been taking care of us for 9 years, Russ. Figured it was our turn." I've used it a handful of times since. The plugs again in February, right out on the ice, 10 minutes with the panel off and nobody waiting on me. The exhaust bolts on my neighbor's old Ski-Doo that he'd been cursing since Thanksgiving. The top starter bolt on Karen's pickup that I'd been putting off for 2 summers. The bar rides in the cargo box now, with the spare belt and the tow rope. If you make a living off a sled, you already know there's no such thing as a small breakdown. And if you run an 850 E-TEC, you already know the 2 plugs I mean. You don't have to pull the clutch. The maker sells direct from their own site, not Amazon. The knockoffs look the same. They don't have the chain. They don't work. They're selling 2 for $119 right now. I’m thinking of getting them for the other guides. They might be my rivals but not even my worst enemy deserves to lose the weekend that pays for the rest of the year. https://wildbeartools.com/products/extension-wrench